I learned to program on an ICL 1900 series mainframe and Systime minicomputer in the eighties, and most of these so-called facts are wrong or just stupid. My car has a variable speed fan - why would that be amazing? The most amazing point about mainframes was their ability to perform complex tasks with very few resources, but the author of this list chooses to reverse this, and say they are great because they are massive.
Early viruses were all hosted on mainframes. They were called rabbits, because they replicated themselves, sucking up the system resources.
Hackers didn't gain access to mainframes because most systems were in locked rooms with no networking capabilities. The systems I worked on didn't even have passwords - hardly a great security model.
I learned to program on an ICL 1900 series mainframe and Systime minicomputer in the eighties, and most of these so-called facts are wrong or just stupid. My car has a variable speed fan - why would that be amazing? The most amazing point about mainframes was their ability to perform complex tasks with very few resources, but the author of this list chooses to reverse this, and say they are great because they are massive.
Early viruses were all hosted on mainframes. They were called rabbits, because they replicated themselves, sucking up the system resources.
Hackers didn't gain access to mainframes because most systems were in locked rooms with no networking capabilities. The systems I worked on didn't even have passwords - hardly a great security model.
--nigel
http://qatarjournal.com/~ngourlay/journal/